Growing a new forest of news while dead-tree media fall

Seeing a new media ecology

My headline takes some liberties with Stephen Berlin Johnson's ecological metaphor for the current transition in the reporting and delivery of news, but I recommend his essay, one of several good ones this week on saving the news or finding a sustainable model for civic or public affairs journalism. Johnson's discussion leads to his information flowchart at the right.

For more about the trend in newspapers going online-mostly, online-only or out of business, see these:

• NPR: Chronicling the death of American newspapers
  
• Seattle Post Intelligencer
• Christian Science Monitor
• Rocky Mountain News
  

Johnson's thoughts came out of the much-blogged-about South by Southwest (sxsw) conference, while a panel discussion on the future of The San Francisco Chronicle -- and local news reporting -- inspired Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg and blogger Dave Winer to write equally thoughtful essays, each finding some room for optimism -- if not about newspapers, about the future of news itself.

(Also see Rosenberg on journalism schools, and Clay Shirky's piece I mentioned a few days ago.)